Shaming as a Speech Genre

Abstract

The article views a speech genre shaming understood as a person’s public censure or criticism leading to cultivating in them a feeling of shame or guilt, which contributes to their loss of reputation and respect in an online community. The author also clarifies the designation and underlying intentions which give an opportunity to delimit shaming from other Internet genres of aggressive nature (such as flame, trolling, holy war, hating, cyberbullying / sybermobbing, cyberstalking, and griefing) and to give its exact definition. The analyzed genre is modelled by the succession of sentences expressing the addresser’s intentions and motivation and is analyzed considering the implemention of its speech strategies (evaluating, positioning, discrediting and explaining), tactics as well as language and speech peculiarities. On the base of the quantitative data there are distinguished, explained and ranged the types of shaming typical for communicating in the Runet, such as body shaming including several subtypes; grammatical shaming; incorrect communicative behaviour shaming; insufficient well-being shaming; a way of living shaming including several subtypes; slut shaming; multi-child parenting shaming; coffee shaming; eco-shaming including two subtypes, etc. The research is based on the analysis of modern Russian 425 contexts selected by the continuous sampling method from different Internet genres, such as web-chats, forums, blogs, social nets and recording communicants’ interaction in this genre.